Amazon’s AWS Workmail enterprise email and calendar application, which interfaces perfectly with tools like smartphones, Microsoft Outlook, and other mail clients is not officially supported with external calendar applications—at least Amazon says that it is not. Another weird quirk is that the platform will support tasks, such as through Microsoft Outlook or Reminders on the iPhone, there is no way to access the tasks directly from Amazon’s Workmail interface. If you look at most of the calendar applications out there, they do not include Amazon Workmail as a supported platform. I contacted Amazon asking how I could connect to a calendar app, and Amazon themselves told me that there is no way to do it!
I have always known that Workmail is built on Microsoft Exchange corporate email technology, and the offering is basically a managed Microsoft Exchange corporate email server environment, whether it is actually running Exchange or is just built on similar underlying technology.
Being stubborn, I didn’t take no for an answer, and started playing around with the Workmail configurations and Cal.com’s Microsoft Exchange connector. As it turns out, there IS a way to connect Workmail’s calendaring functionality with outside calendaring apps like Cal.com (and I imagine, some others)—and it works flawlessly!
Here is how I got it done, click above to watch the video.
- If you are going to use Cal.com, they gave me this link after I told them about this issue. https://refer.cal.com/mosscatski
- If you already use Amazon Workmail, here is where the endpoints can be found: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/workmail.html
- If you are not using Workmail and want to find out more about it as a mail and collaboration service, here’s the page: https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/
One thing I really like about Workmail and a lot of Amazon’s other AWS services is that there is no base charge and no long term commitment. It’s something like $4 per user per month. You can even have a single user! We have less than 10. The users can access it through the web interface, or any email client. The administrator’s experience is sort of like a streamlined Microsoft Exchange corporate experience with plenty of tools such as setting up company policies and rules, spam handling, audit and retention capabilities, and a connection to AWS Lambda if you want to build some kind of exotic capabilities. Other than being a customer, I have no relationship with Amazon.
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